SBC CIS Weekly Digest: 3 — 7 October

Each week, SBC CIS editors look back at the events of the previous week to highlight the most interesting and resonant ones for you.

New regional partnerships, the results of the SBC Summit Barcelona, news from the upcoming FIFA World Cup, the Global Online Gambling Market Report 2022, and the new report for the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) can be read below. 

SBC Summit Barcelona continues to summarize the event. According to the report, this year’s summit sets a new attendance record.

Apart from a new record for the organizer with about 6,000 delegates in attendance over the course of three days, an overwhelming number of delegates (92.6%) said they were very likely to recommend SBC Summit Barcelona to colleagues and friends. 

The biggest-to-date SBC event featured a 200-booth exhibition, two days of high-level conference content with nearly 400 speakers, and a busy program of evening networking parties.

The winner of the SBC Summit Barcelona First Pitch Competition provider of gaming and betting services, Kero Gaming, also shares its thoughts. 

“It felt incredible to pitch to a room full of key industry executives and win. Our company is a micro betting white-label provider, which is a key growth sector in the industry, so being able to get in front of this room was key,” said Tomash Devenishek, CEO & Founder of Kero. 

Several important partnerships were also signed last week. StarCasinò Sport has announced that it has become a new premium partner of Serie A’s AS Roma. The Casino-operated platform provides fans of the Italian top-flight side access to the latest news as well as ‘exclusive content dedicated to them’.

While Parimatch has taken another step forward in the Premier League by signing a partnership with Newcastle United. In a few days, the Ukrainian company signed another global partnership with gaming organization 00Nation to strengthen its relationship with esports and esports betting. 

At the beginning of October, Stakelogic signed an agreement with the online casino and sports betting operator OlyBet and will debut in both Estonia and Latvia.

New partnerships have been made in Romania as well. Betsoft Gaming has announced the launch of its slot gaming titles into the Romanian market with 888casino. Following CT Interactive, which also announced the release of 20 new slots for Romania.

The upcoming World Cup in Qatar remains a hot topic. A number of French cities will not broadcast World Cup matches on giant screens in public fan zones amid concerns over rights violations of migrant workers and the environmental impact of the tournament. 

So far, cities such as Paris, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Lille, Reims, and Marseille have joined the boycott.

Portugal and Spain have invited Ukraine to jointly apply to host the 2030 FIFA World Cup.

The announcement comes as the war in Ukraine is now in its eighth month, and recently four eastern regions of the country were annexed by Russia.

The President of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (REFF) Luis Rubiales noted: “I am convinced that in my country, in Spain, both the football family and society will be proud of the important legacy that this candidacy leaves behind for history. If football changes people’s lives, it must also be capable of improving the world.”

The ongoing war is also taking its toll on the Russian side. According to the authorities, the number of visitors in the gambling zones of Sochi and Kaliningrad has decreased by 20% since the beginning of 2022.

The Krasnaya Polyana gambling zone in Sochi received 272,400 visitors in the first half of 2022, which is 23% less than in the same period of 2021. A similar situation is in the Yantarnaya gambling zone in the Kaliningrad region: attendance in the zone in the first six months of 2022 fell by 15-20% and amounted to about 56,000 people. 

Ukrainian FAVBET Tech continues to help its country attack the enemy in the information and digital space. According to the company’s CEO Artem Skrypnyk, the work is going in several directions at once: from blocking propaganda resources and DDOS attacks on key IT nodes of the enemy to the development of mobile applications that help army units to perform combat missions.

Additionally, last week Global Online Gambling Market Report 2022 was realized. The global online gambling market size is expected to reach $65,316 billion in 2020 and grow at a CAGR of 10.11% over the forecast period to reach a total market size of $128,154 billion by 2027.

The European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) has unanimously adopted a parliamentary report calling on the European Union (EU) to acknowledge and better fund the video game and esports ecosystem in Europe.

Video games and esports have ‘significant social and cultural potential’ to connect Europeans, as stated in the document. However, the text suggests addressing challenges such as doping and match-fixing in esports, as well as the ‘health risks’ posed by intensive gaming and esports. 

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